I wonder about the Doomhammer. It doesn't benefit from Whirlwind Tempest, and since the deck seems to be geared toward lategame value more than burning out the opponent, it seems to me that some more control tools or just proactive stuff like Feral Spirits/Thunderhead would benefit the deck more. Bogshaper also seems way too slow. With the spells already in the deck you might as well add Spirit of the Frog instead to draw more cards, earlier.
I'd also recommend Menacing Nimbus as a decent early drop that gives you something to do early on while potentially generating one of the high end elementals that your deck is running anyway.
But despite tank up on (2) being good Odd Warrior is still out of Wild Meta. Even despite synergies with armor. So context (card pool and meta) matters. A whole lot. The perk of HP, which is the only repetitive part of these decks, is indeed just a perk. The deck themselves are not repetitive, and that's because their success is bound to cards, not by the improvement of their HP. And cards are inherently not repetitive.
I can see that the perk can feel repetitive, but it's still highly compensated by the necessity of cards.
AND by the challenge provided about deckbuilding and homebrewing. At least for the many combinations that are yet unrefined.
By nerf i mean a direct nerf to Genn and Baku themselves, harsh enough to throw their decks out of meta, which they didn't perform, suggesting it would have been overkill.
If cards are not inherently repetitive, but perk hero powers are, does it not follow that a deck with a perk hero power and cards is more repetitive than one without the perk?
If Genn and Baku decks get pushed out of the wild meta then they would cease to be a problem. I've already said as much earlier. Until that happens, the criticisms I've laid out above will continue to apply to those that persist.
The problem with nerfing G&B (hence this whole thread) is that it's hard to address these cards' strength without fundamentally changing how they work. The hero powers give very little room for adjustment, the condition is iconic and also hard to change and nerfing the minions themselves hardly affects the decks, certainly not in a way that addresses the problem. G&B already are oversized Patches. if there were an easy way to nerf these cards but keep their functionality intact I'm sure team 5 would've gone with that instead of yeeting them out of standard a year early.
I'd say you're raising a new argument there rather than actually addressing the point I was making and that my post already contains the rebuttal your argument: "if not necessarily to the same extent".
That's not a rebuttal, that's a claim, and one that I disagree with. The same logic does not apply at all. It could be argued that Big Priest is being addressed due to the extreme amount of critique towards it and the pressure the player base is putting on the developers regarding the deck. That is supported by that Blizzard has been hesitant to actually do anything about Big Priest so far, and seems to be stalling to see whether SoU might fix it with the murloc mass transform card, alternate tools for priest and other solutions.
I don't see how this contradicts anything I'm saying. I agree Big priest is seeing large amounts of criticism, are you arguing that Genn and Baku didn't prior to rotation? Or don't presently?
Supposing that the new BP hate cards like Curse of Murlocs "solve" the problem in wild, would you agree that Blizzard was pressured into printing those cards because of the public outcry against BP?
By the way I prefer it when balance/gameplay issues can be addressed by printing new cards rather than changing cards that already exist, I just don't see how you'd accomplish that with Genn and Baku without printing something that hard-counters hero powers, EG something that disables/replaces the enemy hero power. And I imagine people wouldn't be very fond of that either.
Edit: I also have to say that I think it's disingenuous to frame the premature rotation of Genn and Baku, an unprecedented move by the dev team and arguably the most impactful balance change to the standard meta, as just some minor little tweak. Removing two cards and thereby killing half a dozen top decks cannot be reasonably compared to the recent round of buffs. I stand by my claim that the G&B rotation is to be read as an admission by the devs that these cards are too impactful by design and can't reasonably be fixed by a simple nerf.
You're conflating the importance of issue and the means taken to fix it. The two have a positive correlation but are not the same, and to draw the parallel to how big the issue is in Wild is an inexact argument as well, so while I think either one might be acceptable, to combine the two into a single argument makes the margin of error too great.
That the cards can't be fixed with a nerf is a design issue, not a power level one.
We don't have access to focus group testing, surveys and stats that the people making the game base their decisions on. It's inevitable for there to be some level of inference and argument by analogy when arguing about something like this. I'm not exactly shy to admit that.
You not agreeing with the argument doesn't make it not an argument. If you want to make *that* case you have to actually substantively address the argument and point out where it's fallacious. The devs have stated ad nauseam that their goal isn't just to keep the game balanced, but also "fresh" "fun" "not stale", etc. By most people's standards that excludes high levels of repetitiveness.
Is the discussion about whether or not the cards should be nerfed or will be nerfed? You've conflated the two a couple of times, committing an appeal to authority.
I would prefer it if the topic remained whether they should be nerfed, but when the counterargument being presented is "Wild/HS ought to be X way, so you're wrong", it's very unfair of you to call me out for citing the game designers' views on what Wild/HS ought to be. An appeal to authority isn't always a fallacy, especially with something as subjective as "what is this game about?"
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That's consistency, not repetitiveness. And yes, consistency can be repetitive, but inconsistency is an unfun consequence of unhealthy RNG, and a bad way to break repetitiveness. Many Baku/Genn decks are repetitive, especially Odd Paladin, but that's not because of or inherent to the even/odd mechanics.
I don't disagree that inconsistency can be unfun(highlander decks for example), but as far as I'm concerned there is quite a broad middle-ground between a game being random and arbitrary on the one hand or predictable and repetitive on the other.
Then can you explain why Even Priest is not a deck? By your argument, cards being a secondary part of the decks, Even Priest should be a deck. Or Odd Warrior, which used to be a deck.
Because not all hero powers benefit as much from the upgrade/discount. Priest hero power is already considered one of the weaker ones, it stands to reason that building a deck around improving it wouldn't be viable.
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They are not, which proves cards are key factor, and some classes have them, some others don't, despite all having Genn/Baku.
I wouldn't be foolish enough to argue that the card pool is entirely irrelevant, but that really doesn't prove your case at all. Because the hero power being improved/discounted matters. You can Tank up on turn 2, whereas heal 4 likely does nothing.
If the priest HP made tokens and the class had cards to support an aggro board-flood archetype then odd or even Priest probably would be a thing.
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About HOF:
Once they recognized the problem with Odd/Even, they could have provided a nerf. They didn't, hence the problem was not what you think it is. Why should they let live something problematic in a form that is allegedly still problematic?
How would you nerf "Odd/Even"? Do you mean targeted nerfs to individual cards that are strong on odd/even decks, or what?
I also laid out exactly why they are NOT more repetitive than other decks. YOU are ignoring my argument. ;)
If you feel there's any point you made that I'm ignoring, please restate it. I did my best to address you point by point.
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tl;dr: Odd/Even decks still have to play cards every turn. Only exceptions, turn-2 and turn-1, respectively. How's that repetitive?
I addressed this specifically. This is an extremely foolish hill to die on. Every deck in the game has to play cards in order to win. It's a card game, that's inherent to the genre.
Genn and baku decks are much less reliant on playing cards, especially early on, because they start the game with an improved hero power. You keep reducing this down to a preposterous false binary. The concession is right there in your use of the word "still". Yes, they still play cards (despite being less reliant on them). I genuinely struggle to grasp how this is even a point of contention. Improved hero powers are obviously an advantage, hence the odd/even restriction which is intended to counterbalance said advantage with a weaker card pool and curve.
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And yes, i seriously think it was the only point about HoF, not because the decks felt somehow boring to play against.
And their choice about HoF is proof of the fact they don't even consider the mechanic as wrong or too powerful in the void, just too powerful for Standard.
I strongly disagree with that. If there is a diverse meta T5 doesn't tend to arbitrarily kill off half of the field. The power level arguments that apply to genn and baku certainly also apply to half of the original set of DK's, and yet they didn't see an early set rotation because they were a lot less reviled. HOF-ing the two was a desperation move: there's no way to nerf the cards without fundamentally changing them, and deleting them outright would have been very extreme. It wouldn't be the first time a card has seen multiple iterations of nerfs and changes.
Sorry, but your argument about boring is not better than mine. You are basically saying it is boring because you find it boring. I don't find it boring at all tbh, so your argument falls there.
I laid out exactly in what way Genn and Baku substantively differ from other cards in hearthstone and how that would result in repetitive gameplay that significantly differs from, say, a consistent aggro deck.
Sure you may disagree that this repetitiveness is boring, but to ignore the difference and go "that's just your muhpinion" is to ignore the substance of the argument.
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You are merging the argument of the powerlevel with that of repetitiveness, and that's a fallacy.
They aren't unrelated arguments. If G&B were unplayably underpowered they wouldn't be a problem even if they were still inherently flawed by design because they'd never show up. You can take the argument one step further and say that it's precisely this repetitive card-independent play pattern that makes these cards powerful.
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I substantiated my point by showing you there is nothing repetitive about the actual gameplay of Odd/Even decks.
No you didn't. You named a bunch of different decks that you think are repetitive, but you did nothing to argue your case. You've barely presented it. How is Mech Hunter especially repetitive? How is it cheating, what established "rules" is it subverting? What are your criteria for repetitiveness?
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The powerlevel is obviously there, i won't even try to deny that, but then again, look at the tier levels, and you will see that t1 is populated by other decks, not just Odd/Even.
The reason why they Hofed Odd/Even in Standard was not because the decks gameplay was boring, but because their presence was, for Standard's standard, ie they knew Odd/Even would have dominated the meta for 2 years straight, and that's not acceptable in Standard.
Now the same criterion cannot be applied to Wild, because Wild meta is inherently stale, and only slowly/rarely evolves.
I'm not going to argue that performance wasn't a factor, as I laid out earlier even a bad design wouldn't cause problems if no one played it. But do you really, honestly think they would have prematurely hof-ed those two if people weren't bitterly complaining about them ruining the game? The Standard Baku/Genn meta was rather diverse if you look at the number of playable classes and decks, but a large number of people hated how many of those decks were G&B decks, presumably because they didn't like how those matches tended to play out.
The fact that it's worded as a battlecry makes it so much better with other battlecry enablers like Brann, the new shaman Quest or Shudderwock though. If it were worded as choose twice it wouldn't even synergise with Fandral Staghelm AFAIK, let alone any non-druid cards.
You can already run Pilfer, which guarantees an activated Fence on 2, but with no minion. This is less consistent, but has a 1/2 body.
It's a balance I suppose, although maybe you'd run both.
Point well taken.
I am assuming you're 90% likely to get a non-Rogue reborn card. Not sure if that's right... just my impression thus far.
Getting a neutral reborn card wouldn't activate Underbelly Fence and Vendetta though, it has to be a card from another class. We'll have to wait until all the SoU cards are revealed to calculate the exact odds but it's probably going to be closer to 50-50 whether you get an out-of-class reborn or a rogue/neutral one. (At the moment it's 7 neutral, 0 rogue, and 3 other-class reborns, so 7/10 of not activating burgle synergies).
You could fulfil the condition with a single Circle of Healing or divine hymn in theory, especially if you include cards like Injured blademaster, high-health taunts and Wild pyromancer. The quest reward is really strong and flexible.
I could definitely see midrange priest become a real deck thanks to this quest.
Edit: I just realised Hench-Clan Shadequill would also contribute to completing the quest. Seems like a pretty sweet deal to play that card all of a sudden.
You not agreeing with the argument doesn't make it not an argument. If you want to make *that* case you have to actually substantively address the argument and point out where it's fallacious. The devs have stated ad nauseam that their goal isn't just to keep the game balanced, but also "fresh" "fun" "not stale", etc. By most people's standards that excludes high levels of repetitiveness.
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Actually, this is quite false for Even decks: you consider them repetitive because they are going to Hero Power every Odd turn, right?
Well, just look at it as a bonus. Exclude the Hero Power, consider it an extra, what is left? Well, what you get is a normal deck, playing normal cards, with a constant bonus in Odd turns. But how is that actually repetitive? How is that more repetitive than Murloc Shaman, or Mech Hunter, or Big Priest, or Quest Mage?
I can give you that the thing holds more truth for Odd decks, but at the end of the day, their Hero Power is still a bonus for them, a Tempo move to optimize turns, that can never get higher priority than normal playable cards in their hand.
Genn and baku are cards that provide their effects without their cards having to be drawn, let alone played. From turn one, every single game, you get a permanent "bonus" that considerably improves what you as a player can do independent of any cards you drew. That's the crux of the design problem: hearthstone is a card game balanced around having to draw and play your cards and these two just shit all over the fundamental balancing mechanism of the game, from the start of the game, every game.
The closest analogy there is in the game are quests, but there you have to: a) Sacrifice a card in hand b) Play the quest ASAP c) Complete the condition of the quest, typically takes 4+ turns if not more (and d) Play the quest reward).
Genn and Baku are like starting the game with a hero card active. The fact that they require some awkward deckbuilding choices doesn't make up for the fact that once the game has started they are the pinnacle of reliability and predictability and, dare I say it, repetitiveness.
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So how is that repetitive actually? Their games are still bound to playing cards, first and foremost, despite the synergies with Hero Powers, they cannot win without playing cards in the best way possible. Cards still define their game.
Odd/Even decks just provide a bonus based on hero powers, but they are not repetitive, as their game is still bound to playing cards.
It's repetitive because it gives players a draw-independent edge at the outset that they can build their deck to capitalise on. There, now I'm repeating myself. See how boring that is?
No one is saying that these decks can win without playing a single card, that's a bad attempt at reductio ad absurdum. The argument is that their core gameplay is far LESS dependent on draws, especially in the early game when cards/draws matter the most, because of the edge they get from improved/discounted hero powers.
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Same goes with the predictability argument. It's actually worse: what deck is NOT quite predictable in the meta? Is a deck actually predictable because it slams totems every Odd turns, or because you know their decklist and what they can play?
Any deck that has a fixed start-of-the-game advantage it can capitalise on is *more* predictable than a deck that only gains advantages by drawing and playing cards. Do quests suffer from the same problem, to a lesser extent? Sure. Would G&B be less predictable if you had to meet some in-game condition before they went active: absolutely.
Erh no you swapped the cost first. So your spell in your hand has now 10 mana cost, and this card costs you 1 mana, and when you play it, for 1 mana you get a 10 mana minion. So after you play Prismatic Lens you have in your hand a one mana Phaoris and a 10 mana spell. Then you can play Phaoris for one mana, and since you have a 10 mana spell in your hand now, you get a 10 mana minion on the board.
Well sure, that one secret will cost ten, but the rest of your hand will be (fairly useless) one cost spells in order to make the combo work, which means overall you're getting a lot less out of it compared to a deck that just runs big spells.
I like that mage is getting cheap board clears but I hate that it's a secret. Not a big fan of secretmage in general, but at least it used to be weak against wide boards.
Well we can forget about that with Flame Ward and that new mage minion.
The reborn tag makes this a lot stronger than Obsidian Destroyer TBH. It makes it very likely that the guy will stick for a turn and continue to generate annoying scarabs.
Strong defensive card but how much better is it than rotten applebaum?
In plot twist Warlock, this seems a lot stronger: there are multiple ways to cheat out copies of drawn minions(Betrug, Dorian), and every copy of this guy will soak 2 attacks and heal for 6 instead of just tanking 1 attack and healing for 4.
I guess this is supposed to be Al'Akir's little brother? Very powerful legendary, wouldn't surprise me if this became a staple in control lists and maybe even heavier midrange decks. A good point of comparison is Blazecaller: Siamat doesn't require the elemental setup, does 1 point of damage more when rushed into a minion and has several alternative modes it can be played in, whereas with Blazecaller the only clear advantage is sending that 5 damage face.
I'm well aware that wild has different standards for balancing and a distinct pool of players. I didn't argue that every card that is a problem in standard must be nerfed in wild as well, I said that if a card is so problematic that it has to be HoFed/nerfed in standard it's reasonable to assume that the same logic applies to that card in wild, if not necessarily to the same extent. If Genn and Baku make games extremely predictable and repetitive in standard then it stands to reason the same is true for wild, even if the cards might not be as strong there.
"So problematic" is a lot lighter condition than it sounds like, when Blizzard's philosophy of balancing Standard has been sliding towards tweaking smaller and smaller things, recently even with buffs, in order to keep things fresh. In the light of no such change seen in Wild, I don't think it's reasonable at all to make assumptions like that.
I'd say you're raising a new argument there rather than actually addressing the point I was making and that my post already contains the rebuttal your argument: "if not necessarily to the same extent".
But even if we set all that aside I think the crux of your argument is plain wrong: Clearly Team 5 have been taking an increasingly active and interventionist approach to wild as well. The fact that we've had 2, 3? posts about their intentions to do something about Big Priest, a deck that is over-represented despite a middling winrate tells you that they're no longer concerned only with balance, if indeed that was ever true to begin with.
Edit: I also have to say that I think it's disingenuous to frame the premature rotation of Genn and Baku, an unprecedented move by the dev team and arguably the most impactful balance change to the standard meta, as just some minor little tweak. Removing two cards and thereby killing half a dozen top decks cannot be reasonably compared to the recent round of buffs. I stand by my claim that the G&B rotation is to be read as an admission by the devs that these cards are too impactful by design and can't reasonably be fixed by a simple nerf.
If my opponent takes forever on the mulligan I sometimes alt-tab and miss part of my first turn. There used to be streamers/pros that advocated roping every turn, notably Lifecoach, but that dude hasn't been playing for a few years now and his advice never really caught on on ladder anyway.
I'd assume they're just tabbed unless they do it consistently, then it's probably BM.
It's still worse than town crier. I don't see why they'd have to justify the 1 extra health. It's a fine card and can enable burgle card by turn 1 (if unreliably) but it's by no means busted.
Rather an odd spell to give Rogue right now considering they have togwaggle's scheme. I suppose this is better when played on large minions with a near-empty deck, but it's not like you can just prep this out on the same turn you played your Malygos, say.
I wonder about the Doomhammer. It doesn't benefit from Whirlwind Tempest, and since the deck seems to be geared toward lategame value more than burning out the opponent, it seems to me that some more control tools or just proactive stuff like Feral Spirits/Thunderhead would benefit the deck more. Bogshaper also seems way too slow. With the spells already in the deck you might as well add Spirit of the Frog instead to draw more cards, earlier.
I'd also recommend Menacing Nimbus as a decent early drop that gives you something to do early on while potentially generating one of the high end elementals that your deck is running anyway.
If cards are not inherently repetitive, but perk hero powers are, does it not follow that a deck with a perk hero power and cards is more repetitive than one without the perk?
If Genn and Baku decks get pushed out of the wild meta then they would cease to be a problem. I've already said as much earlier. Until that happens, the criticisms I've laid out above will continue to apply to those that persist.
The problem with nerfing G&B (hence this whole thread) is that it's hard to address these cards' strength without fundamentally changing how they work. The hero powers give very little room for adjustment, the condition is iconic and also hard to change and nerfing the minions themselves hardly affects the decks, certainly not in a way that addresses the problem. G&B already are oversized Patches. if there were an easy way to nerf these cards but keep their functionality intact I'm sure team 5 would've gone with that instead of yeeting them out of standard a year early.
I don't see how this contradicts anything I'm saying. I agree Big priest is seeing large amounts of criticism, are you arguing that Genn and Baku didn't prior to rotation? Or don't presently?
Supposing that the new BP hate cards like Curse of Murlocs "solve" the problem in wild, would you agree that Blizzard was pressured into printing those cards because of the public outcry against BP?
By the way I prefer it when balance/gameplay issues can be addressed by printing new cards rather than changing cards that already exist, I just don't see how you'd accomplish that with Genn and Baku without printing something that hard-counters hero powers, EG something that disables/replaces the enemy hero power. And I imagine people wouldn't be very fond of that either.
We don't have access to focus group testing, surveys and stats that the people making the game base their decisions on. It's inevitable for there to be some level of inference and argument by analogy when arguing about something like this. I'm not exactly shy to admit that.
I would prefer it if the topic remained whether they should be nerfed, but when the counterargument being presented is "Wild/HS ought to be X way, so you're wrong", it's very unfair of you to call me out for citing the game designers' views on what Wild/HS ought to be. An appeal to authority isn't always a fallacy, especially with something as subjective as "what is this game about?"
I don't disagree that inconsistency can be unfun(highlander decks for example), but as far as I'm concerned there is quite a broad middle-ground between a game being random and arbitrary on the one hand or predictable and repetitive on the other.
Because not all hero powers benefit as much from the upgrade/discount. Priest hero power is already considered one of the weaker ones, it stands to reason that building a deck around improving it wouldn't be viable.
I wouldn't be foolish enough to argue that the card pool is entirely irrelevant, but that really doesn't prove your case at all. Because the hero power being improved/discounted matters. You can Tank up on turn 2, whereas heal 4 likely does nothing.
If the priest HP made tokens and the class had cards to support an aggro board-flood archetype then odd or even Priest probably would be a thing.
How would you nerf "Odd/Even"? Do you mean targeted nerfs to individual cards that are strong on odd/even decks, or what?
If you feel there's any point you made that I'm ignoring, please restate it. I did my best to address you point by point.
I addressed this specifically. This is an extremely foolish hill to die on. Every deck in the game has to play cards in order to win. It's a card game, that's inherent to the genre.
Genn and baku decks are much less reliant on playing cards, especially early on, because they start the game with an improved hero power. You keep reducing this down to a preposterous false binary. The concession is right there in your use of the word "still". Yes, they still play cards (despite being less reliant on them). I genuinely struggle to grasp how this is even a point of contention. Improved hero powers are obviously an advantage, hence the odd/even restriction which is intended to counterbalance said advantage with a weaker card pool and curve.
I strongly disagree with that. If there is a diverse meta T5 doesn't tend to arbitrarily kill off half of the field. The power level arguments that apply to genn and baku certainly also apply to half of the original set of DK's, and yet they didn't see an early set rotation because they were a lot less reviled. HOF-ing the two was a desperation move: there's no way to nerf the cards without fundamentally changing them, and deleting them outright would have been very extreme. It wouldn't be the first time a card has seen multiple iterations of nerfs and changes.
I laid out exactly in what way Genn and Baku substantively differ from other cards in hearthstone and how that would result in repetitive gameplay that significantly differs from, say, a consistent aggro deck.
Sure you may disagree that this repetitiveness is boring, but to ignore the difference and go "that's just your muhpinion" is to ignore the substance of the argument.
They aren't unrelated arguments. If G&B were unplayably underpowered they wouldn't be a problem even if they were still inherently flawed by design because they'd never show up. You can take the argument one step further and say that it's precisely this repetitive card-independent play pattern that makes these cards powerful.
No you didn't. You named a bunch of different decks that you think are repetitive, but you did nothing to argue your case. You've barely presented it. How is Mech Hunter especially repetitive? How is it cheating, what established "rules" is it subverting? What are your criteria for repetitiveness?
I'm not going to argue that performance wasn't a factor, as I laid out earlier even a bad design wouldn't cause problems if no one played it. But do you really, honestly think they would have prematurely hof-ed those two if people weren't bitterly complaining about them ruining the game? The Standard Baku/Genn meta was rather diverse if you look at the number of playable classes and decks, but a large number of people hated how many of those decks were G&B decks, presumably because they didn't like how those matches tended to play out.
The fact that it's worded as a battlecry makes it so much better with other battlecry enablers like Brann, the new shaman Quest or Shudderwock though. If it were worded as choose twice it wouldn't even synergise with Fandral Staghelm AFAIK, let alone any non-druid cards.
Getting a neutral reborn card wouldn't activate Underbelly Fence and Vendetta though, it has to be a card from another class. We'll have to wait until all the SoU cards are revealed to calculate the exact odds but it's probably going to be closer to 50-50 whether you get an out-of-class reborn or a rogue/neutral one. (At the moment it's 7 neutral, 0 rogue, and 3 other-class reborns, so 7/10 of not activating burgle synergies).
You could fulfil the condition with a single Circle of Healing or divine hymn in theory, especially if you include cards like Injured blademaster, high-health taunts and Wild pyromancer. The quest reward is really strong and flexible.
I could definitely see midrange priest become a real deck thanks to this quest.
Edit: I just realised Hench-Clan Shadequill would also contribute to completing the quest. Seems like a pretty sweet deal to play that card all of a sudden.
Knife juggles don't count as attacks, if that's what you mean.
You not agreeing with the argument doesn't make it not an argument. If you want to make *that* case you have to actually substantively address the argument and point out where it's fallacious. The devs have stated ad nauseam that their goal isn't just to keep the game balanced, but also "fresh" "fun" "not stale", etc. By most people's standards that excludes high levels of repetitiveness.
Genn and baku are cards that provide their effects without their cards having to be drawn, let alone played. From turn one, every single game, you get a permanent "bonus" that considerably improves what you as a player can do independent of any cards you drew. That's the crux of the design problem: hearthstone is a card game balanced around having to draw and play your cards and these two just shit all over the fundamental balancing mechanism of the game, from the start of the game, every game.
The closest analogy there is in the game are quests, but there you have to: a) Sacrifice a card in hand b) Play the quest ASAP c) Complete the condition of the quest, typically takes 4+ turns if not more (and d) Play the quest reward).
Genn and Baku are like starting the game with a hero card active. The fact that they require some awkward deckbuilding choices doesn't make up for the fact that once the game has started they are the pinnacle of reliability and predictability and, dare I say it, repetitiveness.
It's repetitive because it gives players a draw-independent edge at the outset that they can build their deck to capitalise on. There, now I'm repeating myself. See how boring that is?
No one is saying that these decks can win without playing a single card, that's a bad attempt at reductio ad absurdum. The argument is that their core gameplay is far LESS dependent on draws, especially in the early game when cards/draws matter the most, because of the edge they get from improved/discounted hero powers.
Any deck that has a fixed start-of-the-game advantage it can capitalise on is *more* predictable than a deck that only gains advantages by drawing and playing cards. Do quests suffer from the same problem, to a lesser extent? Sure. Would G&B be less predictable if you had to meet some in-game condition before they went active: absolutely.
Well sure, that one secret will cost ten, but the rest of your hand will be (fairly useless) one cost spells in order to make the combo work, which means overall you're getting a lot less out of it compared to a deck that just runs big spells.
I like that mage is getting cheap board clears but I hate that it's a secret. Not a big fan of secretmage in general, but at least it used to be weak against wide boards.
Well we can forget about that with Flame Ward and that new mage minion.
The reborn tag makes this a lot stronger than Obsidian Destroyer TBH. It makes it very likely that the guy will stick for a turn and continue to generate annoying scarabs.
You'd be summoning a board full of one-drops tho.
Very cool card. I'm interested in playing this even if it isn't the strongest thing in the meta just for style points.
In plot twist Warlock, this seems a lot stronger: there are multiple ways to cheat out copies of drawn minions(Betrug, Dorian), and every copy of this guy will soak 2 attacks and heal for 6 instead of just tanking 1 attack and healing for 4.
I guess this is supposed to be Al'Akir's little brother? Very powerful legendary, wouldn't surprise me if this became a staple in control lists and maybe even heavier midrange decks. A good point of comparison is Blazecaller: Siamat doesn't require the elemental setup, does 1 point of damage more when rushed into a minion and has several alternative modes it can be played in, whereas with Blazecaller the only clear advantage is sending that 5 damage face.
I'd say you're raising a new argument there rather than actually addressing the point I was making and that my post already contains the rebuttal your argument: "if not necessarily to the same extent".
But even if we set all that aside I think the crux of your argument is plain wrong: Clearly Team 5 have been taking an increasingly active and interventionist approach to wild as well. The fact that we've had 2, 3? posts about their intentions to do something about Big Priest, a deck that is over-represented despite a middling winrate tells you that they're no longer concerned only with balance, if indeed that was ever true to begin with.
Edit: I also have to say that I think it's disingenuous to frame the premature rotation of Genn and Baku, an unprecedented move by the dev team and arguably the most impactful balance change to the standard meta, as just some minor little tweak. Removing two cards and thereby killing half a dozen top decks cannot be reasonably compared to the recent round of buffs. I stand by my claim that the G&B rotation is to be read as an admission by the devs that these cards are too impactful by design and can't reasonably be fixed by a simple nerf.
If my opponent takes forever on the mulligan I sometimes alt-tab and miss part of my first turn. There used to be streamers/pros that advocated roping every turn, notably Lifecoach, but that dude hasn't been playing for a few years now and his advice never really caught on on ladder anyway.
I'd assume they're just tabbed unless they do it consistently, then it's probably BM.
It's still worse than town crier. I don't see why they'd have to justify the 1 extra health. It's a fine card and can enable burgle card by turn 1 (if unreliably) but it's by no means busted.
Rather an odd spell to give Rogue right now considering they have togwaggle's scheme. I suppose this is better when played on large minions with a near-empty deck, but it's not like you can just prep this out on the same turn you played your Malygos, say.
Interesting card, but not terribly powerful.